Missouri nonprofit challenges parental consent laws
Right By You, a pro-choice group that focuses on how to help minors get reproductive care, filed a lawsuit that will be the first to challenge parental consent laws following an amendment passing.
Parental notification laws have long been a lightning rod for criticism, with many abortion rights leaders and politicians reluctant to fight against them both before the fall of Roe and after.
These laws, which require that a parent give consent to a teenager who needs an abortion, have their roots traced back decades. They’ve been litigated numerous times throughout the last 50 years. Now, there is a lawsuit in Missouri that will once again challenge them, with the hope that the recently passed constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights will cause a judge to nullify the laws about parental notification.
Right by You, an abortion rights group in Missouri that focuses on the rights of young people, filed a lawsuit in state courts last month that would be the first in the nation to challenge parental notification after a ballot initiative was passed.
I spoke with the organization’s director, Stephanie Kraft Sheley, who said it was odd that minors can be entrusted with decisions about their pregnancy, like surgery and adoption, but not with abortions.
“It just kind of defies logic that we entrust young people with those decisions, but not with the decision to end a pregnancy, which we actually know is like, medically much safer than some of those options, and psychologically safer than some of those options,” Kraft Sheley said. “And so I do think that that's something that I wish we were talking about more.”
Missouri was the first state to enact parental consent laws in 1976. This state's law was challenged in the Supreme Court case, Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth. While the court struck down the universal enforcement of the parental consent provision, it established the precedent that states could require some level of parental involvement for minors seeking abortions.
As the Supreme Court grew more conservative, it began opening the doors for more abortion regulations and an incremental approach to chipping away at reproductive freedoms. Later, in Hodgson V. Minnesota and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court established the constitutionality of parental consent laws.
According to these laws, a minor must have a process to get an abortion without their parents’ consent. It’s done through what is known as a judicial bypass, which means that they present their situation to a judge who then will approve or disapprove of the abortion for the minor.
Within the abortion rights movement, parental consent laws have long been a flashpoint of controversy. The most notable circumstance dealt with the case of Becky Bell, a 17-year-old Indiana teenager who died from complications of an illegal abortion after she couldn’t choose not to tell her parents about needing one and decided not to go to a judge to get a bypass. After Becky’s death, her parents, Bill and Karen Bell, traveled the country and campaigned against parental consent laws. I wrote about that in a previous newsletter.
Kraft Sheley said Missouri's judicial bypass system is inadequate, with courts unprepared to handle cases. There is also no robust legal organization providing services to teenagers, so they don’t have the resources to get an abortion approved either.
“It essentially only existed technically in Missouri and and so now we're in this place where the abortion ban was made official, and then the amendment passed,” Kraft Sheley said. “And now there's a certain very small amount of clinical care that has returned. Abortion has, in some sense, technically returned, but there's no indication that the courts are any better.”
Another part of this issue is the reluctance of national organizations to embrace the campaign to eliminate parental consent laws. As movement leaders grapple with how to shape a widely appealing message, there is a reluctance to push for ballot initiatives that don’t explicitly exclude parental consent because it makes it easier for antiabortion leaders to misrepresent the effort.
Some pro-choice groups’ advertisements for ballot initiatives in these states have said they aren’t calling for parental consent to be protected by an amendment. They also typically say that they will only protect abortion up to viability. The planners of these campaigns often don’t include organizations like Right by You or others working on similar issues.
“A lot of times those folks are not represented at the decision-making table, and the same holds true for young people for obvious reasons,” Kraft Sheley said. “But, these are groups that don't tend to be the ones in the room when the decision is being made, and that's a failure of our movement.”